Control the serum, control the world.

Author: Denise Eagan

My mum had Alzheimer’s for many years. She was diagnosed on December 10th, 2011, but it had shown its ugly face earlier and was obvious by June of 2010. Which is when my Dad died. My stepfather died in 2014. It’s been a rough few years.

And I don’t know how I got onto that. Huh. Guess that’s part of the whine?

At any rate, I had to finally give up on her walking in July of last year. It wasn’t for lack of strength. She had that. It was because the disease, after eating away so much of her brain, had finally reached the part that could instruct her legs to move. It would take 5 minutes of “Mom, just move this leg forward. Yup. Lift it. Just move it forward” and her saying “Okay. Like this?” and trying but failing before I could get her to move that leg. Because of this, I had to try using a wheelchair to get her to an appointment. That didn’t work either. I almost dropped her twice. By the end of July I was no longer taking her to appointments and she was wheelchair bound.

In a long line of losses, the loss of her mobility was the hardest for her emotionally. I, to this day (to this minute as I fight back tears) feel guilty for giving up on her. It was the right thing to do. I know that intellectually. But I want that back. I want to have her walking again and talking. In my heart, I still struggle with whether or not that decision led to her death.

That last phase started the Thursday before Mother’s day. She had bruises on her hands–from what I don’t know–that became swelling in first one arm, then the other. She was hospitalized, where they lanced her arms to let the fluid out. And then told me, on Mother’s day, that she was bleeding internally somewhere. That trying to find it meant trying to fix it, and fixing it meant putting her under. My mother’s brain, at that point, was barely functioning. I was down to “thank you” from her, and hand holding. She couldn’t afford to lose any more brain cells, which would have happened under anesthesia, if she would even have made it through surgery. She had written up legal documents that requested no blood products, antibiotics, surgeries etc be used when she became unable to interact. Since losing any more cognition (which would happen from surgery) would put her in that place, I had to agree with the doc to do nothing. The fact that I’m writing this out, that I’ve gone through it several times with different people, tells you how difficult that decision was. I know it was right. But it’s a struggle to agree to ending your mother’s life.

So we put her on hospice and thought maybe we had a few months. I mean, other than the bleeding into her arms (the swelling kept coming back–she wasn’t clotting) she seemed pretty physically healthy. At least that’s what I saw. But a week into her hospice care she was back in the hospital, and this time when they released her they sent her to a short-term hospice facility. She had, the hospital said, lost more blood and was definitely bleeding internally somewhere from something. A doctor told me that she didn’t think Mom had more than a couple weeks. I was tired. I didn’t believe her. Not really.

I’m still tired.

It was less than a week before she passed. And then I was blanketed in grief and exhausted from 3 weeks of extroversion. Every day, people and not fun people. People telling me my mother is dying people. After that it was planning a service. My siblings and I don’t talk. I won’t even text with one of them. So the planning was, again, exhausting, as was the service. People, people, some painful drama, and a lot of resentment.

By the time it was over I’d extroverted through 4 weeks. Since then, since June 5th, I’ve been trying to recover. To just breathe again. To want to see people at all. I haven’t given a lot of thought to writing and I certainly haven’t written. I’d planned so much. And I should do it. But I feel guilty over the free time I have after my mom passed, and I’m guilty that I didn’t stop it, and I’d be guilty if I tried. So the time I haven’t spent cleaning up my mother’s things, I’ve spent on facebook. I’ve read a little, too, but even that makes me feel guilty. I should be writing. I should aways be writing. I should always be taking care of my mother. Should is a new swear in my life.

Just writing this creates a huge wave of grief. It sits in my throat. I guess most people feel it in their heart, but it’s in my throat. I think from holding back sobs. I miss my Mom. In the end, we didn’t have much left, my mother and me, but we did have hand-holding. We did have listening to music in her facility. We did have me reading to her (Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter because I could get pictures for her of the characters and places.) We did have an occasional smile. I miss that.

So–deep breath–it’s another week without writing. It’s another week of trying to care about writing and failing. But I can’t stay “here” stuck in my grief and introverted exhaustion forever. It’s not a good place. So right now, before I call this post done, I am calling up a file. . .and I paged down to where I left off. I have some minor changes to make in Children of Liberty. And a few minor ones to make in The Liars as well, for purposes of consistency. Such are the issues with world-building. Somewhere there’s a notebook with those changes written out. But I’m not going looking for it today. Today, I opened a file. I have critiquing to do but in between I will look at that file and maybe find places to tweak. It’s the best I can do today.

My Mom passed away last Friday. I got the call, but couldn’t make it in time to be there for her. I wanted to, because she was an atheist and I thought she must be terrified. I wanted to make it easier, but just like everything with this disease, easier is always questionable.

I thought on the way home, as I was crying and trying to drive, that I wished it was Tuesday again. Not Thursday, because the day before no matter what I did, I could not seem to ease her distress. But Tuesday, when she slept half the day. I was so sad. I felt so helpless. All I could do was hold her hand and it seemed like nothing at all. But on Friday, I wanted Tuesday back.

That’s how this disease is. You always want Tuesday back. Even the worst days of the “before” are better than the days of the “after”. I knew it at the time too. I knew when my mother would ramble on and she made no sense at all and introvert that I am, I was quickly exhausted trying to answer, that I would want those moments back. But even then, you don’t hold on to them long enough. You don’t live in the moment enough because there is always pain, often from remembering that other “before”.

You would also think that after all the years of tears that I would be mostly numb right now. I remember one terrible day driving home from a visit, crying in the car, sobbing to my mother who wasn’t there, that I couldn’t fix it. That no matter how hard, I couldn’t make the disease go away. I couldn’t get her back. And I was sorry that I’d failed her. I did–I do even now–feel like I failed her. You could tell me I didn’t. I could say I know, but no matter what, it sits in some dark place in my heart. I can no more get rid of that guilt and sadness than I can destroy the disease.

But those tears were not enough. I am so sad, hurt so much that I wish I could just rip my heart out of my chest and stop the pain. As I writer, I should be able to articulate why, I should be able to put the thoughts that bring this on into words, but I can’t. I don’t think; it just hits me. I’ve lost other people. My father, my stepfather, even my dog (who was a people, at least in his mind). They all hurt, but this is worse and I can’t say why.

This one thing, though, I do understand. I have been able to cry these last months on command. For no reason or whatever reason you wanted to create. I didn’t know why. It was weird. Now I do. It was this. It was the knowledge somewhere that I couldn’t dwell on it, that my mother way dying and I couldn’t fix it. Now it’s here and between the sobbing jags, I reach places where those tears have stopped. So that’s something.

The new grateful reaction on facebook is the my favoritest thing since they took away the bulletin boards and buttons. I’m using it for everything. I’m really not all that grateful. I just like the flower.

Last night’s Big Bang episode surprised me, big time. But it didn’t shock me, which is the sign of great writing to me, when something happens that you didn’t see coming, but isn’t so out-there that it’s unrealistic.

Baby Groot makes me happier than puppies. Seriously. Also there’s a facebook page for Baby Groot. I loved Guardians 2 and baby groot was the best part of it. Not nearly enough of Chris Pratt dancing though.

I always knew that the Trump presidency was going to be this bad. I always knew it was going to be non-stop bone-jarring drama. But I never foresaw the President of the United States threatening the FBI director he fired–a man who was investigating said President–via twitter. There are too many words too describe just how terrible this is.

The city next door to us is in the middle of a man-hunt for a dangerous guy with a gun who shot and killed his girlfriend. I am not sure what I’m supposed to do with that information.

I got flowers for Mum’s day from one of my sons. The card says Happy Mother’s day, Mom but there’s no name. Now I have to text them and hope I don’t accidentally “shame” the one who did not send me flowers.

It’s going to rain here all day Sunday. For an introverted mother, that’s kind of a mother’s day gift. I think I’ll create a menu for myself.

And that’s all I got. Hopefully next week will be calmer and my brain will work better.

I went to visit my Mum today at her assisted living facility. Usually I stay for an hour, so I was going to blog afterwards. Unfortunately I found that she had a very badly bruised and swollen wrist, along with a nasty bruised and swollen let. Long story short, I spent hours there. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have time for Thoughts.

First–I haven’t put those trigger warnings on my books yet. I put in a lot of hours–like 12-14 hour days–into my website and needed some time off. Coming back from the time off into the real world was a huge jolt for me. The real world is not a great place right now. So it’ll be a little while before I get that done.

Second, I have put on and taken off my socks about 5 times today so far. For some reason arriving at the optimal temperature and clothing weight for my feet is a difficult thing for me to achieve. . .and I’m only telling you this because I figure sometimes people come to writers’ blogs to read about writers’ quirks. That’s one of mine. (I have a lot of ’em)

Now on to the stuff.

If you’ve read much of this blog you know I started The PostPlague Trilogy because of an obsession with The Hunger Games series. I read the books and watched the dvds so many times that the words pop into my mind all the time. So much good in that series! And yet, one of the things I had a difficult time with was the darkness in The Mockingjay.
This is when Katniss starts to pay mentally and emotionally for what she has done and most importantly for what the Capitol has done to all of them. She is experiencing PTSD big time. Because it was the last book in the series, I put the books down feeling almost defeated, even though Katniss & friends won. I’ve thought about it a bit, and the “fault,” if there is one, is not Collins’ writing. It’s the story–it’s the lives of these people and the situation they were in. Katiniss was always going to end up with PTSD and it was always going to be in the last book.

That might be difficult for readers to understand, that writers don’t always have a choice in their work. Let me explain it this way: Have you ever read a book and thought, “that’s not what this character would do?” Yeah, I think we all have. And while it’s entirely possible that we are interpreting the character differently than most because of something in our own lives, I would hazard to guess that a lot of times you feel that way because the writer is pushing the book into a direction that the story is not “supposed” to take. Writers will tell you, at least those of us who have done this for awhile, that our books don’t always go the way we want. We start them, we plot them, we outline them, but in the execution we often just follow the characters.

I don’t know if that’s hows Collins felt, but it’s how I view the series. Just based upon who Katniss is, the life she lives, the PTSD problems she had in The Mockingjay were destined to happen. Still it made me sad and depressed and so I decided when I started The PostPlague Trilogy, I would consciously set it up so that Neri would work through those emotions mid-way through.

That is not to say that PTSD is something you get over. It’s not. You can learn how to handle it and it will lessen with time but it’s with you, probably, for life. At least that’s what I’ve read. I have never suffered from it, not the real version anyway.(the designation has been diluted over time so that now we say we suffer from it if we’ve lost a game of cards or something. The actual disorder is very difficult.) What I put in Children of Liberty was from research. Yeah, people say “write what you know” and I don’t know PTSD. But if writers only wrote what they knew, most of the novels we love would never have been written.

At any rate, Neri is destined, based upon her background (there’s evidence you’re more likely to suffer from PTSD if your childhood was messed up) to end up with PTSD. Although she didn’t have a violent childhood, it was hardly loving. Near the end of The Liars she is barely making it through the days. The rough way the book ends–no spoilers!–pretty much guarantees that the next book is going to have a harsh opening. I worked it so that we could see Neri “recover” from it, or at least handle in ways that The Mockingjay could not. Collins told us how Katniss gets by, but we don’t really see it.

So here’s the excerpt, where Neri finally melts down completely. She’s been on this trajectory since the first sentence of the book. If it sounds a little choppy, it’s because I’ve removed parts that would give away the story. I’ve also filled in XXXXs for characters I don’t want you to know because Spoilers! This is one of my favorite parts of the book. I always love the emotional stuff. (Point: This reads more like depression than PTSD, but depression is common with the disorder, and the flashbacks and nightmares Neri has experienced has brought her to to this point)

“Fine! You want me to prove my loyalty? Have I not spilled enough blood for you? How about this.” I grab my steak knife with my left hand and before anybody can stop me, I draw it over my scarred right wrist. Helen gasps and I hear chair legs scraping on the floor.

Because it’s Callie, I relax my arm enough for her to pull it toward her and wrap a napkin around the wound. Simultaneously, Evan gently, but firmly, takes hold of my left wrist. His touch sends a ripple over my nerves. Distracted, I turn to him. His brow is furrowed and worry lines are gathered around his eyes. “Let go, Neri.”

I’m trembling. From anger, from fear. I release the knife and it falls to the table with a tanging thud. Then I scan the other members of COL, who are all staring at me, at my wrist, in varying degrees of shock and wariness. Kyan forced my hand. I’m crazy. I’ve known that for a couple of months. Now they know it too.

Yanking my wrist away from Callie, I snarl, “To hell with you all.” I stomp out of the room, down the hall, and finally through the front door, slamming it so hard the house shakes. A steady drizzle falls from a dull grey sky. It’s not a problem. XXXX designed the shooting range for all-weather use. When I reach it, I retrieve a rifle from the vault, call up a military program and start shooting Inquisitors. I go through a clip. Two. Three.

Nobody comes for me.

Twenty minutes later the rain is falling in earnest, plastering my borrowed green gown to my body. Still nobody shows up. At first it irritates me. Then distresses me. Finally depression sinks in. They aren’t going to come. Once upon a time, when I was High Priestess, people cared if something upset me. Not Grayson, of course, but everybody else. Everybody went out of their way to please me. If I stormed out of a meeting—which I wouldn’t do, because I didn’t throw fits back then—somebody would chase after me. Bring me back. I mattered.

Not anymore.

I’m not High Priestess. I’m just another soldier in COL, and not a particularly good one at that. I can shoot, sure, but my mental state makes me a liability. They aren’t coming because they don’t want me. At best I can function as a figurehead to recruit more soldiers—lure people to their deaths—and they can probably find someone else to do that.

I am dispensable.

It takes another ten minutes for me to fully understand that. By then it’s raining so hard it creates a kind of whitish filter between me and the screen. Even with that, and even though I’ve crossed that imaginary border between normal and insane, I’ve hit every target. I should be proud.

My arms are too heavy suddenly and the gun falls to the ground.

I’ve killed people, on that screen and in real life, and I’ve endangered people, too many others to count. I can’t get to Grayson, so this mission may be my only shot at redemption. Saving XXXXX might mean saving COL, and ultimately the nation. All the better if I forfeit my life in the process. I could make it right.

Or I could until now.

I sink down into the mud and hug myself as tears morph into sobs. I cry for xxxx and xxxxx. I cry for the friends I’ve lost, the dead, and those here who’ve forsaken me. I cry because Kyan’s right. I’m a self-centered witch who married a sociopath and I knew it. I must have. How can I not have known it? I ignored the signs and I brought the beatings on myself. Me and me alone. I am the reason for my scars and broken bones.

(deleted spoilers)

I’m not sure. I do know I was ready to sacrifice myself, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I don’t want to die for nothing, but I don’t really want to live either. It hurts too much.

“Neri.”

The rain is so heavy I don’t hear the squish of Evan’s boots in the mud until he’s standing next to me. His voice is deep and warm. He offers his hand, but I ignore it. I don’t want his sympathy. I don’t deserve it.

“Neri, it’s time to come in.”

I shake my head.

“You’re soaked to the skin. Come with me. Callie’s making you cocoa.”

Cocoa. Hot chocolate in milk, a treat among treats, reserved for special occasions like Forgiveness Day and Testing Day. Even that offer can’t penetrate my gloom. I want him to go away. I want to stay here and slowly become one with the mud.

Dropping his hand, Evan squats next to me. “Neri, we’ve worked it out. They’ll let you come on the operation as long as you promise to follow orders, okay? Now let’s get out of the rain and bandage that wrist.”

I gaze down at it. The rain and my blood have turned the napkin pink. The wound still stings, but I haven’t noticed it.

I turn to him and my heart takes a tiny jump. The rain has straightened his dark hair and is streaming down his face. He’s a rain-melted mess, but his eyes hold that beautiful, ever-present kindness.

God, I miss him. I missed him after we parted ways in school, and I missed him the first two years in Temple City. I missed him for six years after that even though I refused to think about him because I was married and living in Hell. And now, here, right here, even though we’re living together, I still miss him because he feels even farther away than he ever was in SouthMid. Distance isn’t always physical.

“I’m falling apart, Evan,” I whisper.

He reaches up his work-callused hand to push a strand of hair off my face. It’s been sticking to my cheek, giving the rain a conduit to drip off my chin. “Then I guess I’ll just have to put you back together.”

“I don’t think it’s possible.” The tears start again.

“Neri,” he breathes. Then he shifts to sit next to me. He wraps his arms around me and pulls me against him. “You’re not that broken.”

“Kyan’s right. I should never have married Grayson. I should have listened to you and never left SouthMid.”

He doesn’t answer, just pulls me tighter. I can’t seem to stop crying. I take a quivering breath now and then, and try to gather myself together.

“Oh God, Evan, it won’t stop. I keep trying but then I remember something and it starts again. I can’t get past it. How did you ever get past it?”

My coffee does not look anywhere near this good. I’d have to leave the house for that. It’s cold and grey here in New England and I am doing everything I can not to leave the house. There’s precious little food in the fridge, though and I’m currently wondering if my husband would be happy with ramen pride “casserole” with canned chicken. Probably not.

Also, I continue to be flummoxed by how wordpress decides to put pictures in its posting area. Also, I love the word flummoxed. I’m going to use it a few times today.

So, trigger warnings. This started in a facebook group as it seems a lot of my posts do these days. And that’s a grammatically terrible sentence, but whatever. It’s dreary today. Anyway, somebody said that he thought trigger warnings were ridiculous and people shouldn’t do them. Naturally, about 150 million other people jumped on to complain (it was really more like 10) about his complaint. Then, naturally, another 150 million people (probably more like 10) came back to defend his complaint often in pretty ugly ways. It went downhill from there. If you have never seen these kind of things on facebook, good for you. You have good friends and have found that secret, loving spot of the internet that many of us are looking for.

Anyway, I had never even heard of trigger warnings in books so I was flummoxed by the whole thing, but mostly by the anger and vitriol. (See how I fit today’s favorite word in there? Man, I wish I had not found that coffee picture. Mine is pretty boring in comparison.) I was immediately resistant to the idea as I am about anything that says I have to do more work. But then I went to bed and thought about it for awhile. I came up with 3 points.

Trigger warnings are a nicety, a courtesy, from a writer to a reader that lets them know the writer is concerned with readers’ well-being. Done well, it doesn’t give away the story, nobody is harmed and it doesn’t take up a whole lot of space. In that respect, doing it isn’t that big a deal (or a whole lot of work).

Trigger warnings are another way to stop the wrong people from reading your book and then giving it a terrible review. If you warn them and somebody does give it a bad review, then it’s on them. Pretty sure anybody who reads the review will dismiss it at that point.

Some people like gritty stories. A trigger warning might actually intrigue more readers than it loses. And frankly, I am not going to go any further down that road because it looks kind of icky.

Finally, not a point I made on that page (I can’t find the post anymore. It might have been taken down) but why not try to spare somebody suffering from PTSD the pain? There was a whole lot of anger over the idea of doing this, and for the life of me I can’t understand why. If you don’t want to put the warning in your book, then don’t. Why are you (not you personally but you as in the angry people) so enraged by people who want to spare other people discomfort or downright disabling thoughts and recollections? It doesn’t make sense to me, but a lot things don’t make sense to me, which is part of the reason I’m a writer. I’m trying to make sense of the world I live in. So far, it’s a bust.

Here are some basic thoughts on the subject: you don’t need to put trigger warnings on books that the reader should know, just by being a person in the 21st century, are going to contain some nasty stuff. Horror books, war books, serial killer thrillers and probably some gritty cop stories. Trigger warnings in other genres, like murder mysteries, apocalyptic and dystopian genres, like what I write, may or may not be useful. Some readers may assume that violence could happen. Others may not, so it can go either way.

On the other hand, genres that a reader expects to be “safe”–cozy mysteries, most romances, and probably young adult–could really use a warning if you’re throwing something rough in there. One of my historical romances has a kind of nasty rape scene at the end (the heroine has a flashback and her memories are horrifyingly graphic). I feel it’s needed in the story for the reader to truly understand her motives, but I’ve always been a little uneasy about it. I do not want to traumatize readers. Make them (you) uncomfortable now and again? Yeah, if it makes you think. If it helps bring about a conversation in your head about society or the people in your life or whatever. Sometimes the greatest clarity we have starts with uncomfortable thoughts or emotions. But I don’t want readers curled up in ball, unable to move because they are reliving some terrible part of their lives. I don’t want to be the reason for a 2 am phone call to a therapist or a trip to the ER. So that book will get a warning.

While writing The PostPlague Trilogy I have considered friends of mine who have been victims of domestic abuse. I have thought about people who have escaped really terrible regimes in other countries (or maybe non-regimes like ISIS) and how they would react to brutality of the world I created. I suspect some people would find Neri’s fight and her wins to be the comforting. Good conquers Evil stuff, yes you can win in your life too! But not everybody will feel that way and I would never, ever want to hurt a friend. I don’t want to hurt people who would be my friends if I met them either.

Each author has to make this decision themselves. Each author should weigh the pros and cons of losing readers who might have liked their books, violence and all, if they hadn’t been warned, compared to finding readers who re-live past horrors because of the book and end up hating the author for life. This is not a simple “left or right” decision. It’s part humanitarian and part marketing.

For me, I feel like The PostPlague Trilogy is by default violent. It’s pretty clear from the blurb that this is a brutal society and there will be some terrible stuff in the book. But readers still may not actually realize that. So I will, because of that, put a short warning in my books. Just as soon as I get off the sofa, get dressed and get out to the local coffee shop for that coffee up there in the post picture.